2025 Per Enge Early Achievement Award

Presented to: Dr. Rong Yang

Citation: For the advancement of GNSS resilience in challenging environments

Dr. Rong Yang is an Associate Professor at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), and an internationally recognized contributor to resilient positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). Her work has fundamentally advanced the GNSS robustness in challenging environments.

Dr. Yang’s central contribution is the development of a unified space-time-frequency signal processing framework that transforms environmental distortions from liabilities into assets. Conventional GNSS receivers treat multipath, ionospheric scintillation, and interference as separate disturbances that degrade or disrupt carrier-phase measurements. Dr. Yang recognized that these effects often exhibit structured spatialtemporal- frequency coherence. Building on this insight, she developed a generalized state-space model for GNSS signal tracking that formalizes these distortions as coupled processes and redesigns receiver tracking loops to exploit inherent diversity. She also developed spatial signature extraction techniques that map correlation-domain distortions into geometric space features, enabling precise multipath detection in urban canyons where traditional discriminators fail. Her collaborative multi-frequency tracking methods leverage L1/L5 cross-band correlators to isolate multipath, significantly improving navigation continuity in urban canyons.

Dr. Yang has authored more than 60 publications and chaired multiple sessions at the ION GNSS+ in the past five years. She holds more than 10 patents, including a U.S. patent on interfrequency aiding acquired by the U.S. private industry. As a principal investigator on more than 12 grants (total funding > $700K), she advances urban, maritime, and aerospace navigation. Dr. Yang is an ION member and an IEEE Senior member. Her honors include the Outstanding Youth Paper Award (CSNC 2020), Outstanding Contribution Award as an IEEE TAES Associate Editor in 2022, and the Shanghai Pujiang Talent Plan. She has mentored students to win presentation awards at ION GNSS+ and China’s Satellite Navigation Conference. Dr. Yang received her PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore in 2017.